Back in the heady days of July 2007 — shortly after the White House celebrated National Homeownership Month, and before the term “subprime mortgage” became ubiquitous in our political discourse — the New York Times commenced a series titled “Age of Riches,” exploring the lives of those who had grown fantastically affluent in America’s “New Gilded Age.” The inaugural entry in this series likened the concentration of wealth in the early 21st century to those of the mid-1910s and the late 1920s. IRS figures show that the top 1 percent of income earners collected nearly 23 percent of America’s adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2007, compared with 12.3 percent in 1987. The top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners received almost 12 percent of AGI, up from 8.1 percent in 2001. As the 2008 election campaign gathered steam, all the top Democratic presidential contenders were railing against income inequality, with John Edwards reprising his shopworn “Two Americas” theme. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee got into the act.
Then came the financial meltdown and the global recession, which pushed inequality to the back burner. Even the Times has changed its tune: “The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer,” it reported in August. “Over the last two years, they have become poorer.”
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